…I wasn’t able to find out if Wasabia and Armoracia are much related, though I doubt it.
No doubt I gave up too easily, something else I probably wouldn’t do now, like alliterate post titles and neglect to search for ex situ holdings. Anyway, the paper Toward a Global Phylogeny of the Brassicaceae1, which came out a few months before that 2006 blog post on mine on wasabi which I have been revisiting, clearly relegates Eutrema (aka Wasabia) and Armoracia to quite distinct clades of the Brassicaceae (click on the phylogenetic diagram to see for yourself). Thanks to Ruaraidh for tracking that down. Not least because it gives me a chance to also link to yesterday’s post at The Botanist in the Kitchen on the phylogenetic tree of food plants in general, and nevermind that it doesn’t seem to feature wasabi.
That Nibble yesterday about the BEGIN Japanology TV programme on roots and tubers led to some more digging around, as it were, and eventually I unearthed this gem on wasabi.
Which reminded me that one of my early posts on this blog was about Wasabia japonica. What’s strange about that old post 2 is that six years on I can’t imagine writing something like that without including a link to a WIEWS report on how many genebank accessions there are of the crop around the world. And I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing. Anyway, two, as is happens, and not where you’d think. There. I feel better now.
On the small islands of the Pacific, it is proposed for the planting of only three coconut varieties: a ‘green tall’ such as niu afa, ‘Malayan red dwarf’, and ‘Tahiti red dwarf’. Subsequently, six new varieties will be produced from this mix without any costly controlled pollination programme. And, farmers will have a diversity of coconut varieties to choose from. It is important to spend time with the people living on the islands to identify existing varieties and to progressively remove existing coconuts once the new palms begin to bear. This is a collective decision that village authorities need to agree on. The long-term benefits are continued biodiversity.
“We are not making a coconut plantation, we are landscaping an island, so the important thing is to make it pretty.”
That’s Dr Roland Bourdeix, starting about 4:20 mins in. 3 It’s his idea to plant small Pacific islands to just one or two coconut varieties, rather than bringing lots of different varieties together in a genebank. In what he calls the Polymotu Approach to coconut conservation, you let the coconuts themselves — and isolation — do the hard work of controlled pollination. The coconut conservationist just gets to travel from isolated island paradise to isolated island paradise, making sure that everything is ok, taking the odd measurement, and packing up coconuts for shipment when someone else somewhere else in the world wants that particular accession. Nice gig if you can get it.
No doubt I gave up too easily, something else I probably wouldn’t do now, like alliterate post titles and neglect to search for ex situ holdings. Anyway, the paper Toward a Global Phylogeny of the Brassicaceae 1, which came out a few months before that 2006 blog post on mine on wasabi which I have been revisiting, clearly relegates Eutrema (aka Wasabia) and Armoracia to quite distinct clades of the Brassicaceae (click on the phylogenetic diagram to see for yourself). Thanks to Ruaraidh for tracking that down. Not least because it gives me a chance to also link to yesterday’s post at The Botanist in the Kitchen on the phylogenetic tree of food plants in general, and nevermind that it doesn’t seem to feature wasabi.